Posted on 04/13/2007 8:16:45 AM PDT by Rutles4Ever
On Wednesday, More4 broadcast Travels with My Camera — A Matter of Life and Death, a “personal journey” by the journalist Miranda Sawyer. This was heralded by a piece in The Observer, written by Sawyer, explaining the purpose of her quest.
Sawyer’s dilemma has been that, until recently, she had been a dyed-in-the-wool, card-carrying, pro-choice feminist. After the birth of her son last year, however, she began to have doubts about the ethics and logic of abortion. “I was calling the life inside me a baby because I wanted it,” she wrote, after visiting picketed abortion clinics in America. “Yet if I hadn’t, I would think of it just as a group of cells that it was OK to kill. It was the same entity. It was merely my response to it that determined whether it would live or die. That seemed irrational to me. Maybe even immoral.”
Later she explained that: “When you’ve experienced . . . pregnancy and birth, and the fantastic beauty of the resulting child, it’s hard not to question what a termination does, or is.” In a nutshell, since becoming a mother, Sawyer has found herself — while still ultimately agreeing that women should be able to have abortions — becoming more troubled by the pro-life argument.
It’s odd, because, since I had children, I’ve found myself becoming much less troubled by the pro-life argument. Of course, that echoes that old, black-humoured mum joke, often heard in playgrounds on wintry February afternoons — “What do you think should be the cut-off point for terminations?” “I dunno. Secondary school?” — but also reflects how many issues still remain within the abortion debate.
Last year the Guardian columnist Zoe Williams wrote a wholly clear-headed and admirable piece examining why women always felt compelled to preface discussion about their abortions with an obligatory “Of course, it's terribly traumatic, no woman enters into this lightly”. She went on to explain that this is because, however liberal a society is, it assumes that, at its absolute core, abortion is wrong, but that a forgiving State must make legal and medical provision for it, lest desperate women do a Vera Drake down a back alley and make things even worse.
Abortions are never seen as a positive thing, as any other operation to remedy a potentially life-ruining condition would. Women never speak publicly about their abortions with happy, relieved gratitude, in the same way that they would about, say, leaving an abusive partner — despite the fact that this impacts much, much less on their lives than an unwanted child. There are no “Good luck with your morning-after pill!” cards. People don’t make jokes about it — despite the fact that all the truest jokes are about vexed topics and cover every other subject, including cancer, death and God. Yet however much a single, childless woman isn’t encouraged to discuss her positive abortion experience, this pales in comparison with mothers who then have abortions. Our view of motherhood is still so idealised and misty — Mother, gentle giver of life — that the thought of a mother subsequently setting limits on her capacity to nurture, and refusing to give further life, seems obscene. Just as mothers must pretend that they love other people’s children, never wish to be violent or get hog-whimperingly drunk, wear a cowboy hat and ride one of those mechanised rodeo bulls, so they must pretend that they are loving and protective of all life, however nascent or putative it might be. They should, we still quietly believe, deep down inside, be prepared to give and give and give, until they simply wear out. The greatest mother — the perfect mother — would carry to term every child she conceived, no matter how disruptive or ruinous, because her love would be great enough for anything.
I have problems with that assumption. For one thing, I believe something very elemental and, in the most academic sense, nonChristian. One of Sawyer’s biggest postmotherhood dilemmas over abortion was trying to work out where “life” begins with a foetus, and concluding that if abortion could occur before “life” begins, that would be a “right” kind of abortion. But given that both science and philosophy continue to struggle to define what the beginning of “life” is, wouldn’t it be better to come at the debate from a different angle entirely? For if a pregnant woman has dominion over life, why should she not also have dominion over not-life? This is a concept understood by many other cultures. The Hindu goddess Kali is both Mother of the Whole Universe, and Devourer of All Things. She is life and death. If women are, by biology, commanded to host, shelter, nurture and protect life, why should they not be empowered to end life, too? I’m not advocating stoving in the heads of children, or encouraging late abortions — but then, no one is.What I am vexed with is the idea that, by having an early abortion, a woman is somehow being unfemale and, indeed, unmotherly. That the absolute essence of womanhood and maternity is to sustain life, at all costs, whatever the situation.
My belief in the ultimate sociological, emotional and practical necessity for abortion did, as I have mentioned before, become even stronger after I had my two children. It is only after you have had a nine-month pregnancy, laboured to get the child out, fed it, cared for it, sat with it until 3am, risen with it at 6am, swooned with love for it and been reduced to furious tears by it that you really understand just how important it is for a child to be wanted. And, possibly even more importantly, to be wanted by a reasonably sane, stable mother.
Last year I had an abortion, and I can honestly say it was one of the least difficult decisions of my life. I'm not being flippant when I say it took me longer to decide what work-tops to have in the kitchen than whether I was prepared to spend the rest of my life being responsible for a further human being. I knew I would see my existing two daughters less, my husband less, my career would be hamstrung and, most importantly of all, I was just too tired to do it all again. I didn't want another child, in the same way that I don't suddenly want to move to Canada or buy a horse. While there was, of course, every chance that I might eventually be thankful for the arrival of a third child, I am, personally, not a gambler. I won't spend £1 on the lottery, let alone take a punt on a pregnancy. The stakes are far, far too high.
Ultimately, I don't understand antiabortion arguments that centre on the sanctity of life. As a species, we've fairly comprehensively demonstrated that we don't believe in the sanctity of life. I don't understand why pregnant women -- women trying to make rational decisions about their futures should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin.
However, what I do believe to be sacred and, indeed, more useful to the earth as a whole is trying to ensure that there are as few unbalanced, destructive people as possible. By whatever rationale you use, ending a pregnancy 12 weeks into gestation is incalculably more moral than bringing an unwanted child into this world. Or a child that, through no fault of its own, would be the destructor of a marriage, a family, a parent. It's fairly inarguable to say that unhappy children, who then grew into very angry adults, have caused the great majority of mankind's miseries. If psychoanalysis has, somewhat brutally, laid the responsibility for mental disorders at parents' doors, the least we can do is to tip our hats to women aware enough not to create those troubled people in the first place.
most importantly of all, I was just too tired
Living inside a mind that reasons along such lines must be an unspeakable, daily hell.
I feel deeply sorry for her husband and children, spending so many years in the presence of a monster.
Good Lord.
Ping. WTF? I don’t even know where to start. I hope her children are able to shake off their upbringing.
Why would you expect depth of feeling from a Euroslt TV host?
Why should men assume all women are today deserving of any special consideration due to their sex?
She's going through thinking, "right about now, he'd be babbling his first beginnings of words . . . and pulling himself up on the furniture . . . and beaming at me and his daddy . . .
No wonder she has to try to justify herself, to put those thoughts out of her mind.
Prayers for her.
Man, you weren’t kidding with that alert.
Jesus, come quickly!!!!!!!
She’s gonna burn in hell ping!
:*(
Hey, Rudy said he’s pay for his dauhgters abortion. It’s just mainstream now. /s
If you don’t want a child then don’t have sex, use the pill, use a condom, etc. Don’t have your fun then say “Damn i’m pregnant! I don’t want this baby. It will hurt my relationship and my career. Oh well guess I will just get an abortion.”
My ex wife had 2 abortions. I could understand both. I know that there were other options, but I would never tell her she should not have had those abortions. She knows that there were other options as well, but she could not go through carrying the baby and I would not say she was wrong for that.
. . . deliberately taking a human life is a well marked line that it is simply wrong to cross.
Oh, surely it would be more equitable for the taxpayers to pay for it ...
My wife wanted to rob a bank. She had other options, but I couldn’t tell her she was wrong. ....................................sarcasm
Now, here is a woman who has had two children and is, one assumes, of at least normal intelligence, so she knows how the process works. How about if she takes a couple of the pounds she saved by not playing the lottery and buy a box of condoms? Or take a few pounds more and invest in some other contraceptive? I know some people have a moral problem with contraception. I'm assuming she doesn't, since how could a woman who knows how the biology works and yet takes no precautions to avoid pregnancy, not even "being careful" during her ovulation time, and has such a la-di-da attitude to her own abortion, have any qualms about contraception?
This is a tragically darkenend soul. I say that not in judgment of her; I just let the evidence she herself presents convict her. She is at once a victim of and an advancer of the culture of death.
Oh, heah. Forgot he was a socialist too.
I think that a woman has made a “choice” when she jumped into bed with someone.
This is one of the ugly faces of the culture of death monster.
I have...no words for this whole article. I guess I'm in shock.
Everyone must pay so that all people can exercise their constitutional rights.
Yes. Except some constitutional rights like abortion, not mentioned in the constitution, are more important than others
I honestly don’t care what you think of her situation. It had nothing to do with expense of bringing up a child, the strain on her life or any of that. All of that could have been easily taken care of as her family, though no where near rich, does not struggle and her mother was a nanny and could take care of the child while at her job. If I had been with her at the time, things may have been much different. I don’t know that for sure. For both of those pregnancies she had been raped. At the time she was on medication for depression. Add that to being raped and then to find out that the man who raped you got you pregnant.
Like I said, I understood her reasoning. Would I have wanted to do it differently? Yes I would have. But, I would not have told her how wrong she was for doing what she did and called her a murderer.
GAD!! She had children and a husband and chose an abortion?
review!
That’s why it’s so important that we elect the right-thinking folk, who will inform us of the proper heirarchy of rights.
(Okay, that’s enough sarcasm to make the point :-).
If she feels this way, she should just get her tubes tied. But she wants it both ways, apparently.
Was she held at gunpoint and told she would rob the bank or die? /NO SARC
Notice that adoption was never an option for this “unwanted child”.
:o)
Well dummy, for the same reason most of us do not possess the legal power over the lives of others, save in certain circumstances. We accept Adam Smith's reasoning that the three most basic rights of all humans are to life, liberty, and property, and they they can only be deprived of any one of those when they have violated those same rights of someone else. As far as the essence of motherhood being to preserve life at all costs, that's only half-true. Motherhood protects the young at all costs, teaches the young to survive on their own, and then casts them out to fend for themselves. While that's a pretty primitive view, it's motherhood at its most basic.
Yeah, ain't that the truth.
The pagans pretty uniformly believed in killing their unwanted or embarrassing children, by "exposing" them if they weren't successful at killing them in utero.
(Then there were the pagans who believed that children were valuable sacrifices to Molech.)
As the West is de-Christianized, this attitude has returned, and will continue to return, with a vengeance. After all, the being ultimately responsible for it has 2000 years worth of denied bloodlust to satisfy.
The child is in God’s loving arms now.
Words fail me.
She was raped twice and become pregnant both times????
Right.......
She is a selfish slut, resorting to pagan mumbo-jumbo to attempt to justify her murderous deed. PUKE!
So, now I am a liar. LOL! I am a liar because I don’t completely agree with you on an issue. I am surprised you actually come to this site and complain about liberals.
Actually, she has been raped 3 times, but she didn’t get pregnant the third time. I payed that man a little visit myself though.
Your ex may be the liar. I assume you are just repeating her story.
Who wants to be this whore was sleeping around and the child wasn’t her husbands?
The husband should take his 2 daughters and run. This woman will kill the girls if they become inconvienient.
Oh come on, one woman has been raped three times???
The story is getting more unbelievable.
Actually, hers and the rapists. One admitted to raping her and others when he was arrested. The other admitted to raping her and 16 other girls just before his knees were taken from him by a slugger from Louisville, which I had no part in. The third guy was her boss. I had the pleasure of meeting him twice, but only once that he remembers.
OK
For the first time I can recall, I’m speachless...and a little scared.
So typical of agenda-driven deceivers to use the 'all or nothing' method of argument. It would never occur to such a dead soul that degrees of the issue do exist and that a differnet pespective could lead to a more raitonal way to change this horrific trend to kill the alive unborn.
The concept of self defense, if applied correctly to the issues involved in pregnancy termination decisions, could change the entire complexion and approach to the issues.
Abortion: The ULTIMATE BETRAYAL by the mother who should be the number one person to love and protect you.
WOW! Imaging there being more than one rapist in the world. Imagine if a woman has been raped more than once. I’m sure that never happens either.
I will give you the benefit of the doubt on the second one. I got that story from the man who “used” the bat. It could have been made up. Knowing the man as well as I do, I tend to believe him, but will not try to pass it off as fact again. The third I know personally, and he still works in the town that I live in.
As far as her being raped multiple times, I can promise you it happens. I went to school with a girl that was raped twice in the same year. Though you probably wouldn’t believe that either. Guess you are one of those “I have to see it to believe it people.”
Oh dear God.
Moral absolutes/Pro-Life/Catholic/MORAL OUTRAGE ping!
This is just...GAH!
The same thing has happened with respect to "date rape" - the fraudulent use of the term has devalued the actual crime and exposed the victims of actual rape to disbelief and scorn.
So you just have to accept a certain amount of skepticism when it comes to three rapes and two pregnancies resulting . . .
. . . but the kids paid the death penalty in any event.
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